Thought I would give some first impressions in case Blizzard reads these.
High points:
Storytelling and story pace when it is told are great.
Graphics team has done a great job as well (except for some minor gripes on ambiance explained below).
Lacking points:
The movement and zoom feels so clunky and awful. I hated how lost ark felt and this is like a bad ripoff. Needs to have faster movement with a higher zoom. Nobody likes crawling around like a snail with a tiny long cooldown hop. Getting a 10+ second teleport was like a bad joke when i unlocked it.
It looks too clean. Again its like a bad lost ark ripoff in that department. D2 had a nice grimey and aetheric vibe to it. Really felt that was lacking with the overall aesthetic. Maybe some filtering and lighting adjustments would go a long way. Base modeling looks great.
Also related to the zoom, D4 also suffers from the awful aspect ratio and effective range problem. I should not have to shrink my screen just to cast a max range spell or see enemies at max range, and only in one dimension. It’s extremely bad design that poe also suffers from and i’m honestly shocked Blizzard did not implement a solution (like unlocking zoom further than max range aggro/spell range)
Summary:
Overall its a great starting point for the game, but i hope Blizzard can spice it up and take the best parts of d2, d3, poe, etc. to truly make something legendary. I sincerely hope the devs are willing to put in the effort to make this the best arpg and not something that fizzles out in a few weeks. The gameplay and especially movement really missed the mark so far, but ill remain optimistic.
The game also felt way too easy so far. But it’s impossibe to have a full view of that with what was included in the beta.